That reads great. I remember loving the idea. But then…I just started wondering how in the world would you pay a floor filled with amazing people their great people salary while you tried to figure out where your ship would go?  I appreciated the idea from the ‘How To Make Average Employees Extraordinary’ article about “trying to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things.” (Though cringe a bit there – that means you assume you know how to do extraordinary things yourself, and that you’ve somehow gotten the right to inflict that on someone else.) But I think I digress.

So I wonder: do you see any teaching applications to the ideas mentioned in the article? Steinfeld makes a few points that I instantly saw applications from…I wonder if you noticed something different or more? (Hint: please share!)

1. Getting Clear On Mission: Have you taken the time to really be clear on the WHY  behind what you’re doing each day in class? Really. Why are you showing up for work every day? I somehow doubt that it’s because you’re getting rich off of this. And it isn’t because of the amazing healthcare benefits either. So….what’s your drive?  And how well are you accomplishing that mission each class?

Epicenter’s mission: English that Matters (TO OUR CLIENTS!) It’s so valuable to have a sit down with yourself and just think: “Are my lessons really about my students and helping them OUTSIDE of class to be better?” or, “Are my classes usually meaningful for my students?”

I’ve found that if I don’t often sit down with myself to think through my mission and get clear on it, I tend to get distracted from it. Busy. Moving sideways instead of forward.

2. Create a sense of personal responsibility.  ’What are YOU doing YOURSELF’ to improve? I think that speaks for itself.

3. Coaching. I love this point. “It’s not enough to tell someone to improve. You must show them how.” (Steinfeld) How interesting that this seems to draw awfully close to one of the lies we can tell ourselves as teachers….If I don’t say it, they don’t learn it. Is there a contradiction here?  I don’t think so. For sure, there will be times where students will make amazing progress without my involvement. But there most certainly are times where coaching is required. Example: do you assume that your students know how to understand a vocabulary word simply from the context of the sentence where they encountered it? Have you ever heard yourself say: “Try to figure out new words by the words that live around it. (context.)”  Your students nod their heads, and you think they know how to do this. But have you ever taught them HOW? For some, this could be a coaching moment.

What’s your take? Can you make average students extraordinary?

(Photo By paul (dex))

According to Tom Sallee:

1. If I say it then they will learn it.
2. If I don’t say it then they won’t learn it.

2011 June 6. Sam Critchlow, in the comments:

Lets not forget the contrapositives, which must also be false:

1. If they’ve learned it, it’s because I’ve explained it well.
2. If they haven’t learned it, then I just must not have explained it well.” (Via Dan Meyer The Two Lies of Teaching.)

My 2 cents:

“If I say it then they will learn it.”  - This is fantastic as is. Ego check. (And be checking that every single day I teach. )

“If I don’t say it, they won’t learn it.” -These ideas make me reflect on my role as a teacher. Having my students learn is not 100% my responsibility. Some of it is. But some responsibility rests with my students.  In fact, learning is something that is going on fluidly, without my interaction with my students. “My students” aren’t really mine because learning can happen anywhere and any time they connect with a concept of English learning, understand it, and employ it. They don’t always need me. They can, if they choose, do much without my input.

What’s your take?

(Photo by Search Engine People Blog)

So according to Colvin, top performance is not always linked to having a special talent, intelligence or some super human skill. Instead, it seems to be correlated strongly to deliberate practice.

Definition of Deliberate Practice:

“The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago….deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them.” (Emphasis mine. Taken from: “Why Talent is Overrated” Geoff Colvin)

So thinking still about how we  help students to practice. I wonder, according to this article and definition of deliberate practice, how much of what we do REALLY is helping students step beyond what they can do now?

Have you been able to identify where your students are with their English level? More importantly, have you identified where they NEED to be? (Think: Maybe your student needs to begin developing speaking and listening skills to be able to successfully participate in a telephone conference or meeting.)

I’m not talking about the generalized (and mostly useless) phrase: “My goal is to speak English fluently.”  Sorry, but that’s not specific enough. That opens the door for student AND teacher to hide, don’t you think? There’s little to no way to measure progress on that goal. And since it usually takes years and years to master a language (for most normal humans, anyway.) I think that we give ourselves permission to make the learning process mediocre. Not on purpose. (I don’t know any teacher or student who sets out to give themselves a mediocre experience.) No, not on purpose, but perhaps mediocre simply because that’s how things have been done over the years. Maybe we don’t have any other way?

But what would happen if English classes were executed differently? Something like this: Student X is a beginner. (Let’s start with a hard ball to hit.) Her boss and her just finished discussing her career development plan inside the company. They both identified that her role would be changing soon, from one with only local influence, to one of international focus with their head office.

Her role demands that she start developing her English skills. English only conference calls and presentations are on the horizon.

Problem: Student is a very  low pre intermediate level English learner. What’s the best way to help her? Would normal English classes offer the solution? (You buy your pre intermediate course book, you show up to class (most of the time), you engage in course activities, answer listening comprehension questions, read small articles and answer questions about that, hold mini conversations with teacher and classmates, and sometimes engage in writing activities.)

I know. I’m providing a simplistic little box of what the typical English class looks like – but ask yourself: with whatever additions you’d add to my little simplistic summary, would it be enough to help our student reach her career development plans? Or have we asked too much of ourselves and our eager student?

If Talent Is Overrated is right, and it sure seems to be in the ballpark of right, then the typical English class isn’t the kind of practice our students need.

I often hear myself say: “Student X is having such a hard time with learning English. I think perhaps that he/she is just one of those people who don’t have strong language learning skills.” Or “He/She just doesn’t have the language learning ‘gift.’”

Or maybe the problem is much worse: Perhaps it’s not just because the student doesn’t ‘have what it takes.’ Perhaps the real fault, the real problem, is that the ‘practice just doesn’t have what it takes.’

What’s your take? Do you feel that typical English classes are enough? After you read the article I linked to above, do you still think there are people who just ‘don’t have what it takes’ to learn a second language? Or is it more about how practice is designed?

(Photo By Monica’s Dad)

“We’re as good as our last meal…” (Taken from Gordon Ramsay on staying on top of business.“)

Managing a restaurant/being a world class chef and being an English teacher: never thought that they had much in common until I came across this article. If you didn’t catch anything for your classroom practice, why don’t you try and read it again. There’re a few ideas here.

Today’s Idea: “We’re as good as our last meal…” (Ramsay)  So if you insert “class” instead of “meal” you get something pretty interesting.  ”We’re only as good as our last class.” Now that’s something to think about isn’t it? It’s so easy to take students for granted – that they’ll always show up the next class. The group will always be there because their company is paying for it, etc. It’s easy to slip into that way of thinking. It’s happened to me. It’s easy – but very risky.

The truth is, as the Ramsay article goes on to state: clients will vote with their feet. They likely won’t tell you that the last class sucked, or that it was boring, or that they found it really hard to figure out. They’ll just cancel on you, or stop showing up. And when that happens, HR will soon start noticing – and before you know it, you’ve lost a class or group – and in the end, money.

Being a great teacher is not a one time event. It’s not something that happens to you once, and remains true for the rest of your career. It’s something you do each day with each class you give. It’s something you have to build up and work hard to maintain.

How? Here are a few ideas that I came up with:

• Adapt a “classroom as a restaurant” mindset. Imagine your students as your paying customers, and remember to cook something up for them that YOU would like to sit through AND pay for.
• Ask for feedback – in most good restaurants, the floor manager makes their rounds while you are eating to ask how the service and food has been. Do the same: ask your students how they liked the class. Ask often, and listen carefully. When you get feedback, make sure you adjust accordingly.
• Read your students: unless I’m really ticked off by service or food at a restaurant, I won’t complain about it even if I’m not that happy. Why? I don’t want to bother. I don’t want to make a scene. I dunno. But it happens to me.  There are also students like that. Perhaps not really upset with the class, but not really happy either – but for some reason, they are unwilling to complain. So watch your class carefully. Are they showing up on time? Do they participate? Clients will vote with their feet – or silence.
• Ramsay goes on to say that he’s happy when clients experience other eating joints – because he knows that they will come back to him when they taste the difference. Could you say the same thing about the work you do in your class? Would you happily invite a student to go off to the competition knowing that your work is so tight that they’ll come running back? If you wouldn’t dare do that, what do you need to change to make it so?

My mind was instantly captured with ideas: sending a hand written thank you note to one of the HR managers who works with me – and who today sent me some pretty useful info for a local ESL book publisher. But not just a thank you note….what about a nice hot cup of Starbucks to start the day?

And then I got to thinking about all the students who have been taking classes with us for the last year. How could I connect with them? (Brain is still moving on that.)

Then I came across this great post over at Seth’s blog. Reacting. Responding and Initiating.

We tend to reserve the third bucket, initiate, for quiet times, good times, down times or desperate times. We wait until the inbox is empty or the new product lines are due (at which point the initiative is more of a response). It’s possible to spend an entire day blogging and twittering and facebooking and never initiate a thing, just respond to what’s coming in. It’s possible to spend an entire day at P&G (actually it’s possible to spend an entire career) doing nothing but responding…

Take a look at your Sent folder. Is it filled with subject lines that start with RE: ? Consider your job at the University–do you actively recruit people who don’t even apply for professorships? What about your blog–does it start conversations or just continue them?

What did your brand or organization initiate today?

What did you initiate?

Seth’s Blog: Reacting, Responding & Initiating.

Initiate. What have I initiated recently in my company…and in my classroom with my students?

That’s why human nature is so enraging. When something is going wrong, when the economy is out of sync, we panic. We obsess about just one of the sixteen boxes and ignore the others. We talk ourselves into hysteria about how, “none of our customers have any money,” or, “in this bleak economy, we’ll never make a sale.” Instead of using the relative downtime to build up the other 15 boxes, we just sit in the corner, keening, worrying about that one box that’s out of whack.

By focusing on the red box, the sore one, and ignoring the other elements of what makes our product or career worth marketing, we cause two problems. First, our attention does no good at all on the problem at hand, and second, the other boxes suffer.

Word! And a valuable read. Our focus is so imortant isn’t it?

While competency based evaluations are stressful for the student, I think they are incredibly more accurate means of assessing language progress. You can hack a written exam. (I remember taking sentence structures from the questions my teachers wrote, and using them to shape my answer.) But live presentations are quite difficult to wing – especially if you have a light Q and A session after (again in the target language.)

Over at the It’s A Hardknock Teacher’s Life blog, there’s a great post that got me thinking about how and how not to create competency based assessments. Missprofe argues that if care is not taken, the assessment can be disconnected from authentic language production – something we should avoid at all costs.

“I, too, want to assess what my students know and are able to do with the language, but I want to do so in a way which produces natural language.  For me, reciting letters and identifying numbers out of order isn’t communication. Conversely, spelling one’s name and reciting important telephone numbers is, for they are tasks that students may actually need to perform.”(Competency Testing? Missprofe)

I think this is more of a design issue. It’s not that competency based evaluation is off – it’s how it was deployed in the classroom. A rethink at teacher level is necessary. At the beginner stage of language acquisition, being able to recite letters and numbers are important skills that must be demonstrated, and would therefore belong inside your competency evaluation. (Your students must be able to produce this target language in order to advance.)

The question now is: how do I design an evaluation that would mimic a real life situation? Attaching classroom activity to reality is terribly important.  Students have to see and feel that “What I’m doing in class will actually help me when the class is over.”  This is especially true of adult learners – the more ESL teachers can link classroom work to student reality, the stronger the motivation to learn will be.

Maybe an effective competency evaluation would be having students exchange cell phone numbers, or email addresses to each other.

The link between classroom activity and outside life is vital for students to remain fluent with their L2 after instruction stops. Most students – and I include myself – don’t remember their French or Spanish after school not because of faulty teaching, but because there’s no ongoing need to produce the L2 in their day-to-day reality.

Perhaps we should also teach effective habits of L2 learners. Not only focus on what students need to do or produce to move on to the next level, but also demonstrate how they can keep their L2 alive and growing AFTER language instruction is over – WITHOUT a teacher present. After all, if you stop using an L2, you’ll eventually forget it.

Everyone on your team should be able to articulate their role and not have a title.

LeadingSmart: Jim Collins on Building a Great Church.

The entire list on the blog is worth reading and thinking about…but this last line got my attention because of how often I think we fail at helping people know and understand their role.

Question to Ponder: How well could the people working with me articulate their role? How well would what they say align to our company mission? Professional Development sessions ahead…

One potential drawback for candidates used to being able to prepare for a language test by rote learning vocabulary and rules of grammar while standing on a crowded train is the fact that IELTS does not lend itself to this form of preparation. Of course, preparation courses and materials are available, as are practice test books, and these are very valuable means of helping candidates become familiar with the format of the test, particularly the Listening and Reading tests. However, preparation for direct tests of writing and speaking should really involve other people; for guidance and feedback in the case of the former, and as interlocutors in the latter. According to Cambridge, in preparing for their exams, candidates develop skills they need to make practical use of the language, and I would argue by extension that by using the language, whether at work, academically, or socially, candidates are preparing for the exam. (Nick Boddy The Revision of the IELTS speaking test)

So there you have it: prepping for major ESL exams should move beyond your memory and hours of book work. If the test is any good at all – it should look into how well you fare in real life. You vs another person. You vs a job interview. You and your presentation vs your audience.

We’re in the middle of prepping two clients for the KET and the IELTS. Both prep courses are using Cambridge prep material. But I totally agree with Boddy’s point: the books just won’t be enough. A strong connection to life outside the book is a must. Can you REALLY use this stuff when you need to? Or are you only good at negotiating mock test formats?

I guess to sum this all up: Bad test prep: follow your test prep guide to a T. March through your course from cover to cover. Answer all the questions, and never – EVER – deviate. Afterall, the coursebook knows what your student needs to succeed. Stepping out of that structure will lead your student to certain failure.

How You Should Help Your Student Prepare

It’s not ONLY about the book. Focus on skill development. Today, more and more Cambridge and ETS exams are being mapped to guage actual skill development – like what the CEFR , alte.org and Canadian Language Benchmarks describe. So instead of working with students around finishing their book on schedule (and yes that’s important) you should be looking and paying more attention to how well he/she can ” describe themselves their family and other people.” (KET Spoken Interaction skill requirement) for example.

Irrelevance comes from always doing the things you know how to do in the way you’ve always done them.  Tom Peters

Now take that to your classroom and think it over for a while! Being relevant is about doing things that you don’t always know how to do because you’ve never done them before.